Thursday, June 30, 2016

19 House Democrat Websites Have Been Down For Days, Hacked
Following Sit-In

Hackers took over 19 official government websites for
Congressman since last Thursday after a major
hacking incident compromised the network.

The affected representatives contract their website
management with the company DCS
Services who works exclusively with House
Democrats.People who visit
the official sites of the nineteen affected legislators see a “site under
maintenance” message.

…Ferson said that
at this point, they have no evidence or specific reasons to believe that the
hack was directly related to the day-long protest over gun control, but Gordon
Stanton, director of congressional services at DCS, said that “we do not believe it is a coincidence that this
happened just as the Democrats started officially wrapping up their sit-in on
efforts to prevent gun violence.”

…Politico
reported that DCS builds its websites using Joomla, a content management system
that has a history of significant
security flaws and that, “anger at DCS is so widespread that some aides
[from affected offices] asked colleagues on an internal email list for
suggestions of other vendors.”

…This latest hack
follows a string of security breaches for Democratic Party officials, including
a hack of the Democratic National Committee.

A database described by some as a "terrorism
blacklist" has fallen into the hands of a white-hat hacker who may decide
to make it accessible to the public online.

The database, called World-Check,
belongs to Thomson Reuters and is used by banks, governments and intelligence
agencies to screen people for criminal ties and links to terrorism.

Security researcher Chris Vickery claims to have obtained
a 2014 copy of the database. He
announced the details on Tuesday in a post
on Reddit.

"No hacking was involved in my acquisition of this
data," he wrote. "I would call
it more of a leak than anything, although not directly from Thomson
Reuters."

…His copy of the
World-Check database contains the names of over 2.2 million people and
organizations declared "heightened risks." Only a small part of the data features a
terrorism category. Additional
categories include individuals with ties to money laundering, organized crime,
corruption and others.

He is asking Reddit users whether he should leak the
database to the public. His concern is
that innocent people with no criminal ties may have been placed on the list.

The information isn't really secret either. Users can buy access to the database from
Thomson Reuters.

Leaking the database, however, could create risks and tip
off "actual bad guys" that they’ve been placed on the list, Vickery
said.

The Guardian: “Google has rolled out new tools to let users see
what its ad-tracking service has learned about them, and to let users opt in or
out of a new personalised ads service. The
addition to Google’s account settings, called My Activity, allows users to
review everything that Google has tracked about their behaviour – across
search, YouTube, Chrome, Android and everything else – and edit or delete it at
each step. If you use Google for everything you do, you might be surprised by just
how much it catalogues about your comings and goings on the internet…”

Japan has always feared foreigners.I see the US becoming more like them.

Totally forgetting or ignoring the lessons of what
happened to Japanese-Americans in the U.S. during World War II, it seems:

Japan’s Supreme Court has
approved the government’s blanket surveillance of Muslims in the country.

The country’s top court struck
down a second appeal by Japanese Muslim plaintiffs against what they perceive
an unconstitutional invasion of their privacy and freedom of religion. Mohamed Fujita, whose name has been changed to
protect his identity is one of the 17 plaintiffs in a lawsuit that challenged
extensive monitoring of Japan’s Muslims, Al Jazeera reported.

Fujita and the other plaintiffs
sued the government following the leak in 2010 of 114 police files, which
revealed religious profiling of Muslims across Japan.

Originally, the regulator won its case and ordered the
social network to stop tracking non-members when they visited publicly
available Facebook pages.

The Brussels Appeals Court overturned that, saying the
regulator had no jurisdiction over Facebook, which has its European
headquarters in Ireland.

…Willem Debeuckelaere, president of the Belgium privacy
commission said: "Today's decision means simply that the Belgian citizen
cannot obtain privacy protection when it concerns foreign players. The citizen is thus exposed to massive
violations of privacy."

…Initially the
court found in favour of the Belgian data authority. It said that collecting the data on the
web-surfing behaviour of millions of people who were not members of the social
network was a "manifest" violation of Belgian data protection law,
irrespective of what purposes Facebook used the data for.

…The ruling
though was ultimately about who has authority over the social network.

"Belgian courts don't have international jurisdiction
over Facebook Ireland, where the data concerning Europe is processed," the
court said.

What assumptions are behind this?US students can’t learn STEM?All foreign students want jobs in the
US?Voters might like it?

We can all see the future around us. Uber, Airbnb and
Alibaba have all seemed to come out of nowhere to take commanding positions in
their respective sectors of local transportation, hospitality and retail. Together, they and other companies that are
basically network orchestrators with a digital platform are leading a
revolution in business model design.

You, as an IT leader in a
traditional sector of the economy, might wonder what this revolution has to do
with you and your company. Everything. The benefits of this new model are so
compelling, and the underlying premise is so basic, that it will inevitably
take root in virtually every sector. And
as an IT leader, it is your responsibility to help your company adapt as soon
as possible.

(Related) A brick and mortar business turning into and
online marketplace.Amazon is building
distribution centers; Walmart already has them.

…On Wednesday the
retailer said it would open its free two-day shipping program to any U.S.
customer, an expansion of the $49 per-year service designed to grab shoppers
from Amazon’s popular $99 a year Prime program. Until now Wal-Mart allowed only a limited and
undisclosed number of shoppers to sign up.

…The move shows
Wal-Mart believes the steps it has taken to improve its fulfillment
capabilities have prepared it to compete head on with Amazon Prime for the
growing slice of retail sales that take place online. Wal-Mart, which has been struggling with
sluggish U.S. sales growth, has made bolstering its e-commerce operation a
priority and is investing $2 billion to that business.

Armed with an array of sensors, commercial drones are
about to become a new source for digital information. We expect the drone market to surge to nearly
$7 billion by 2020 globally, driven by regulatory clarification, continuously
decreasing component costs, and – most important– ongoing innovation that
connects drone capabilities to big-data analytics.

…For many
companies, drones are quickly becoming another component that must be
considered in developing digitalization strategies. Backed by cloud services and big-data
techniques, the unprecedented data gathering capabilities of drones have the
potential to radically alter the competitive dynamics of the information
landscape.

Security teams handling Identity and access management
(IAM) are hampered by dirty data and need management help from a chief data
officer, according to a new report by TechVision Research.

IAM is typically defined as a “security discipline that
enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times
for the right reasons.” But identity
data is riddled with errors, which ultimately raise security and privacy risks,
the report says.

The problems include multiple versions of employee names
and titles in various systems — and even “ghost” employees. “We find a plethora of identity data
challenges, including multiple authoritative sources of data, inconsistent
data, redundant data, old data and misclassification of data,” the report says.

It’s hard to believe, but one of the most important
changes in the way people write in the last 50 years has been largely
overlooked by historians of literature. The
word processor—that is, any computer software or hardware used for writing, a
nearly ubiquitous technology adopted by poets, novelists, graduate students,
foreign correspondents, and CEOs—has never gotten its own literary history.

Perhaps it was just too much under our noses—or, I
suppose, in front of them.

Now it finally has one. Five years ago, Matthew Kirschenbaum, an
English professor at the University of Maryland, realized that no one seemed to
know who wrote the first novel with the help of a word processor. He’s just published the fruit of his efforts: Track Changes, the
first book-length story of word processing.

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About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.